Tuesday, December 6, 2011

Revisit of Mental Health

In September 2005, Dr Glasser wrote a small booklet entitled Defining Mental Health as a Public Health Issue. The description that Dr Glasser gives for mental health - as opposed to mental illness is as follows.

You are mentally healthy if you enjoy being with most of the people you know, especially with the important people in your life such as family, sexual partners and friends. Generally you are happy and are more than willing to help an unhappy family member, friend or colleague to feel better. You lead a mostly tension free life, laugh a lot and rarely suffer from the aches and pains that so many people accept as an unavoidable part of living, You enjoy life and have not trouble accepting other people who think and act differently from you. It rarely occurs to you to criticise or try and change anyone. If you have differences with someone else you will try and work out the problem; if you can't you will walk away before you argue and increase the difficulty.

You are creative in what you attempt and may enjoy more of your potential that you ever thought possible. Finally even in very difficult situations when you are unhappy - no one can be happy all the time - you'll know you are unhappy and attempt to do something about it, You may even be physically handicapped as was Christopher Reeve, and still fit the criteria above.